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Dresden anniversary

Feb. 1945. This is how the Dresdeners who lived far enough outside the city center to survive the deadly firebombing behaved afterward to clean up their city. Does this remind you of the Jewish tales of how they were forced by German guards to carry heavy rocks from here to there for no purpose? Maybe this is where they got that idea.

By Carolyn Yeager

THE GERMAN MEDIA HAS GONE DARK ON ANY 2018 REMEMBRANCE for its tortured Dresden residents of Feb. 13, 14 and 15, 1945.

The best I found was a series of recycled photographs linked to from the bottom of the long front page listings at Der Spiegel. The photographs emphasize how the rebuilding of the "Old Dresden" made the "New Dresden" of today better than ever.

ON THE EVENING OF FEBRUARY 13, 1945, A SERIES OF ALLIED FIREBOMBING RAIDS BEGAN AGAINST THE GERMAN CITY OF DRESDEN, reducing the “Florence of the Elbe” to rubble and flames, and killing as many as 135,000 people. It was the single most destructive bombing of the [most destructive] war [in history]—including Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and all the more horrendous because little, if anything, was accomplished strategically, since the Germans were already on the verge of surrender. [From History.com]

In remembrance and protest, I present this first hand, eyewitness account by survivor Margaret Freyer which I found here and which I think does justice to the unspeakable horror forced on over a million unarmed German citizens and refugees by the governments of (firstly) Great Britain under Winston Churchill and (secondly) the USA, under Franklin D. Roosevelt. I cannot condemn these men and their governments enough, even though 73 years have now passed since this terror was perpetrated on innocent souls.

An apology and admission of wrongdoing, which has never come, is certainly in order. -Carolyn Yeager